Hi Lester,

I've always been a bit surprised that Order Status is not an OE field. Proper sales order tracking with auto-triggered email notifications sounds like an interesting and worthy feature for the future.

I believe that there are situations where the notifications would be useful both internally (staff) and externally (customers). However, I would imagine this to be a reasonable to significant amount of development (design/programming) and therefore the future could be quite a ways down the road.

... so please update us on how you make out in the meantime - here's my 2 cents for a possible workaround:

1. Create an OE Optional field "Order Status"
2. Create an OE optional field Validation Table ("finder" type) with your pre-defined Statuses (blank, In Production, Picking, Shipped, etc.)
3. Users update Order Status as and when appropriate
4. GV prepares a mail merge list of status updates daily (Last Updated Date = Today AND Order Status = ???). It will most likely be wise to develop some statuses that do NOT trigger an entry on the list.

BTW - as not everyone has GV - you may be able to acomplish step 4. with the OE Filters and Excel Direct features as well but depending on the size of the dataset, performance might be an issue.

Regards, Pete

PS: Be warned that I've never actually done any of the above but I'm a big dreamer Good luck